Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Sunday, December 16, 2012

Multicultural Apartheid

All political systems are
imperfect.If we accept that our ideal
for Society is to strive for perfection within our society then we can find a
workable vision by which we may judge ourselves and just as important, judge
others.

If we can agree where we are, we can
also agree where we want to be.

So what is government? It is the
process (system) though which people are systematically and consistently managed
for the good of the greater identifying group.According to Wikipedia, it consists of legislators, administrators, and
arbitrators.But above all else our
system is democratic. It means that power is vested in the people.Abraham Lincoln in the speech he delivered
midway through the American Civil War stated in The Gettysburg Address (in
November 1863) that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom
and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
perish from the earth.”So born out of
blood and suffering government exists as a direct consequence of the will of
the people and for the benefit of the people.

Not for a deity or a militant prophet
and not for a class of, or group of people, but for all the people.

That we exercise this right to
determine our future by nominating our elected representatives to serve our
purpose (not theirs but ours) is fundamental to our system of government.The form of government that we have chosen is
intended to preserve our inalienable right to freedom although by nominating
others to protect our interests we voluntarily limit our own freedom in favour
of collective security.Our liberty is
safeguarded by formal acceptance of equality of rights and privileges.The way we
safeguard our rights and privileges is by participating in a system that
involves multiparty elections, freedom of speech and equality of opportunity.

What it does not mean is that we all share the same values
or that we all receive the same benefits from our work or even that we have
absolute equality; only, for better or for worse, that we have the same
opportunities in society and that as such, we respect all members of society with equal vigour.

In the 19th and for much of the 20th
Century we lived in a world that was still profoundly ignorant and largely
uneducated.During this period of the
modern era class, wealth and historical privilege contributed towards
disillusionment, revolution and violent change.The 20th Century delivered globally to mankind western ideals
of universal education, access to health care for all and equality of
opportunity.For many, the latter and the
former were unacceptable infringements of their religious vision.And the agony of the Second World War has
largely failed to deliver on the promises that beckoned to the restof us.

The distance between the upper classes of society and the
rest has grown wider.Multiculturalism
promised equal but separate development and we raised no objections to this
apartheid by any other name because it invariably attached an Islamic or non-white
label to it.The working classes became
the middle classes and their expectations, subject to constant media
bombardment, failed to satisfy our ever increasing awareness of what we can
achieve and therefore, on what we are missing.Instead of managing our expectations Society fed them and periodically
dashed them against the rocks of economic mismanagement.Democracy and Western Government should
present the rest of the world with an ideal to which they too can aspire.
Instead, we today present the world with a damaging image of dysfunction,
corruption and abuse.Society’s excesses
provide a Manichean model that demonstrates our freedom of action and in our
guilt-free gluttony our insensitivity to the pain that we have caused to others
in the pursuit of our individuality.Ultimately it is damaging to society because the casualties we created
will potentially overwhelm us.

In the 1930’s Liberals believed that euthanasia, forced
sterilisation and other, more ‘robust’ methods of population control
(‘engineering’) were necessary for the health of society.In fact, because Liberal values represented
no more than the educated classes self-justification for maintaining privilege they
represented the intellectual justification for Stalinism and Nazism; no more
and no less than this. And so what we have today is a class of unashamed
liberal and left wing elites that take pride in the guile that permits them to casually
celebrate bigotry.The latest political
obligation is blind acceptance of anti-Zionist propaganda which, usually and
joyously embraces antisemitism while ruthlessly ignoring everything else.

Extremism has always been the logical bi-product of a
stubborn refusal to recognise the essential equality of everyone.

The free and equal practice of political
self-determination is both cultural and economic. And it is where society has
failed.Because in guaranteeing the
rights of the individual it has forsaken the obligations of the individual to
the group.And minority rights cannot be
superior to majority rights even when we justify this practice in asserting
that positive discrimination contributes towards undoing the damage of the
past.Instead, it enshrines
discrimination in common law and creates a culture of rightful prejudice.What is politically correct becomes no more
than sanctioned discrimination and it encourages a culture of graduated
transgression which blurs the line between misdemeanour and felony and creates
a climate of ethical irrelevance.

Hitler rose to power with just over 30 per cent of the
popular vote. Terror was given a public platform and rewarded for its
bravado.It hid behind the law and
exploited society’s weaknesses.We
refused to fight for the values that we believed to be worth fighting for. The
multicultural ideal can only work if it is predicated on tolerance as an absolute of the society that
practices it, therefore, within the ideal there is an inherent contradiction
wherever conflicting values exist.Because
of this elemental flaw, if we respect the law, the values of the dominant culture
must take precedence over any minority values with which they conflict.

Instead, in giving our blessing to a new paradigm for Society
we have sacrificed our equality for a lie that rewrites history and leaves us
unprotected.

Our whole system of law is based on justice being not
simply ‘done’ but as crucially, being seen to be done.Today this is not the case.